Sunday, December 20, 2015

The
protagonist in the new film My Wife is an
Actress is a sports journalist who has the good luck to be married to a
beautiful and famous actress, and the bad luck to be driven half-crazy by it.
They can’t walk a block without being interrupted by autograph hunters, and
he’s increasingly bothered that she kisses other men and appears in the nude.
All of which seems like a plausible set of concerns, no doubt one of the many reasons
for the famously high mortality of celebrity marriages. But there’s a twist to My Wife is an Actress – the couple
(called Yvan and Charlotte) are played by Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg,
who are married in real life, and Attal also wrote and directed this film.
Which seems to mean there must be some autobiographical background to this. And
yet when Gainsbourg is naked in this
film, it’s at Attal’s own behest.

My Wife is an Actress

I could
fill an article just listing filmmakers who trained the camera on their wives
or lovers. Some of them, like John Derek parading his wife Bo in Bolero and Tarzan the Ape Man, seemed at least in part to be massaging their
own egos. But there are many examples where the director’s love of cinema
intertwines with his (I can’t think at present of any instances involving a
female director) love for a woman, creating something distinctly personal:
Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. I
remember a critic who wrote how Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry was filmed with a special glow that only occurs when a
director is falling in love with an actress, as Richard Brooks was at the time.
I could never figure out what that actually meant – how there was that direct a
relationship between Brooks’ state of mind and the technicalities of lighting,
focus, etc., but it’s a beguiling concept.

Unfortunately,
My Wife is an Actress has little to
add to this history. Attal plays the film for easy, soft-centered comedy. A
weird subplot, in which is Jewish sister argues with her goy husband about
whether to circumcise their unborn son, suggests distinctly that he views
himself as a sort of French Woody Allen. Also Allen-style, he casts a celebrity
in his movie: Terence Stamp, who plays the star of Gainsbourg’s latest movie.
Stamp is very good, but the film holds him at arm’s length, as though the real
Attal were as leery of him as his character is. The film opens with a series of
photos of famous screen sirens, as though intending to place itself in the tradition
I mentioned, but exhibits little substantive interest in cinema, except for a
rather incongruous scene where the crew strips naked, to help Gainsbourg over
her misgivings. Actually, the only character in that scene that isn’t nude is
Attal himself, revealing as little of himself physically as he does
emotionally.

Swept Away

Someone
else whose wife is an actress, British director Guy Ritchie, also directs her
in a new film. She is Madonna, who in her latest incarnation lives in London,
reportedly speaks in a faux British accent, and likes to be called Mrs.
Ritchie. The new film is Swept Away,
a remake of Lina Wertmuller’s 1974 Italian film about a rich bitch cast away on
an island with a rough-edged sailor. On board the ship she abused and belittled
him, but now he has the upper hand: he slaps her around, generally treats her
like a dog. She rapidly falls in love with him.

I can no
longer remember anything about the Wertmuller film, but I’m certain it was a
little more assured than the Ritchie version. The opening scenes of the new
film are particularly bad, with Madonna very ill at ease in her brittleness.
Later on, it becomes mainly bland. Still, I have some sympathy with Wesley
Morris in the Boston Globe, who
called it “a curiously affecting document of a director trying to show the
world why he loves his wife – not the changeling pop star, but the actress.”
Despite the layers of misogyny and brutality (which are somewhat soft-pedaled
here), the film is basically about a lost woman who finds fulfilment where she
least expects it, and Ritchie seems in tune with Madonna’s softer side (it
would be rather surprising, of course, if he wasn’t).

I
certainly didn’t find Swept Away as
laughable as many critics did. I think it misses most of its opportunities though.
Given the inherent eroticism of the premise, the film is definitely too
decorous – presumably a downside in this case of a director watching over his
wife. And you wonder what drew Madonna to this material in the first place.
Such a tale of role-reversals and recast lives should have struck a chord with
a performer who’s made herself over so many times, and the film should surely
have been able to find a way to draw more effectively on that history. As it
is, Madonna seems “herself” only in a misplaced fantasy sequence where she
performs “Come on-a my house” in front of a big band.

Punch-Drunk Love

The
current movie that best delivers what you’d expect from having an astute spouse
behind the camera is Punch-Drunk Love,
which doesn’t actually fall into that category of movies. It’s just that
director Paul Thomas Anderson executes a weirdly narrow ambition, one that only
a lover would normally concoct – to reveal the subtleties and complexities that
underlie Adam Sandler’s screen persona. He does it brilliantly, but I do wonder
how highly one can really value such an esoteric exercise.

The film
takes Sandler’s familiar nasally goofiness, and its short-fused underbelly, and
as if by applying some chemical agent disentangles and clarifies them. Sandler
has never seemed so intelligent, so sweet, or so dangerous. The film shows how
great love dwells disturbingly close to great anger; how non-conformity from
another angle resembles madness. Anderson has come up with a deliberately
slight story that perfectly facilitates his central project, with Emily Watson
nicely playing his new love. The film assiduously avoids the familiar – perhaps
too assiduously. At various times I tired of the music score, the locations,
the widescreen framing, and in general of the whimsy. Still, it’s hard not to
admire a movie that at various times reminds you of Robert Altman, Jerry Lewis,
Jacques Tati, Blake Edwards, Quentin Tarantino and others, while always seeming
distinctly itself.

It’s
unclear whether this is a new start for the much-derided Sandler, or whether
the film will stand as an aberration. His performance in the film doesn’t seem
to me like great acting, but rather as a great piece of engineering on Anderson’s
part. No future director will ever make the same effort for Sandler, unless he
marries one.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

This is
the seventh and last of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film
Festival.

Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma)

De
Palma’s closing gala feels like a self-parody even by his standards, although
with him it’s hard to know whether that’s an insult or a compliment (I mean it
as the former). Starting with an intricately choreographed jewel heist at the
Cannes festival, it jumps forward seven years as one of the perpetrators
(Rebecca Romjim-Stamos) finds her past closing in on her; Antonio Banderas is a
photographer who gets caught in the web. The film must have less dialogue than
almost any Hollywood work since Mel Brooks’ Silent
Movie – it’s pure design. In something like The Untouchables and Carlito’s
Way, you accept De Palma’s set pieces as a complement to the film’s central
thrust, but in Femme Fatale there is
no thrust. You register split screens, and camera angles, and references to Vertigo, and clever juxtapositions and
logistical daredevilry, but it amounts to nothing. Towards the end, the plot
twists become particularly dumb, but I’ll at least give the movie credit for a
striking finale. As with anything else, you start from your own aesthetic
ground rules in judging cinema, and you can certainly imagine a set of such
rules under which De Palma’s fetishization of style would render him the best
director in the business. Trouble is, I think the last person to hold that
opinion died around the time of Blow Out.

Le Fils (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)

The
Dardennes’ latest documentary-style film belongs in the Howard Hawks tradition
of men expressing themselves through their work, although there’s nothing
Hawksian – nothing at all Hollywoodian – about the Dardennes’ minimalist
approach. Olivier Gourmet won best actor at Cannes for a role that’s famously
observed in large part from behind the back of his head – he’s a carpenter and
instructor of delinquents who takes into his class the juvenile killer of his
own young son, five years earlier. There’s some suspense attached to the
question of what he’ll do with this knowledge, but the film doesn’t play that
up. Even compared to the Dardennes’ previous films La Promesse and Rosetta,
this is an extremely low-key work, the larger part of which consists of Gourmet
and his charges handling wood. It finds its way to a note of renewal; le fils
refers primarily to the dead son, but the killer (not knowing his teacher’s
identity) also asks Gourmet to be his guardian, and the man’s morbid
fascination with the kid expresses itself in a way that overlaps with
paternalism. The title could also allude to Gourmet himself as a disciple of
his own methodology and minimalism. I found the film very interesting, but it’s
too narrow and circumscribed to be considered a major work.

Sex is Comedy (Catherine Breillat)

Breillat’s
last film A ma soeur (Fat Girl) was
banned in Ontario because of an extended sex scene involving a teenage girl.
Her latest is built around the filming of that scene, with Anne Parillaud playing
a proxy for Breillat herself and actress Roxane Mesquida repeating her role.
The movie illustrates the tensions and mixed motivations that underlie the
portrayal of desire in cinema; the director’s rapport with the male actor in
particular veers across the spectrum from near-seduction to open hostility (but
then, we’re told “antagonism is a tonic for desire.”) It’s just a job of course
(he refers several times to being well paid for it) but the demands it makes
verge on cruelty, even if you momentarily think yourself their master (she says
actors frequently accept a part for the nude scenes, but then fear always sets
in). The final scene sums up the film – the actress seems genuinely traumatized
through identification with her character and the direct demands that have been
made on her, but this suddenly melts into sheer satisfaction at a job well
done: pragmatism and joy virtually coexist with self-loathing. Prior to that,
viewers may get some easy laughs from the actor’s prosthetic penis, and the
film is certainly one of Breillat’s lighter works, but it’s as troubling as it
is funny.

Festival Summary

There are
a million festival stories in the big city, and here’s mine. Objectively, I was
probably too busy to take time off this year, but hey – it’s the film festival!
So I decided I’d stick to a disciplined routine of three movies a day, no more
no less, and then go into the office at least once a day. As it was, I
generally ended up going in twice a day – zooming in for an hour, hurling
through messages and five-minute meetings, then zooming out – or else catching
up late at night. On one occasion I came in at 5 am, before the movies started,
and passed a presumably festival-related party still in full swing at the
Rosewater supper club.

My work
objective worked – I didn’t fall behind on anything. And I saw those three
movies a day – no more, no less (if you noticed I’ve written more than thirty
reviews of film festival movies across these seven articles, it’s because I
cheated by adding in a few that I saw afterwards, in commercial release). Not
surprisingly, I tired myself out to a possibly hazardous extent, and dozed off
for a few minutes during a dozen or more movies (usually about twenty minutes
in, regardless of their quality). Does this sound like a recipe for misery? If
so, the cake didn’t rise: it was probably my best festival ever.

I stayed
pretty close to my basic strategy – brand name directors, not necessarily
avoiding movies that might open later, but privileging those that likely wouldn’t,
adding in some choices based on strong advance reviews, and a few wildcards
based purely on the time slot. I only saw a few American films, and they were
mostly disappointments (In America, Femme
Fatale, Auto Focus). My favourite was Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls, a movie that hasn’t received the attention it deserved (I
didn’t see the People’s Choice winner, Whale
Music). Others in the top flight include Talk to her, Lilya 4-Ever and 9/11/01.
Lost in La Mancha, for a movie fan, was one of the festival’s most
straightforward delights. Many others had numerous points of excellence. If I
were doing it all over again, I’d probably have avoided La derniere lettre and My
Mother’s Smile, but that’s about it. I especially regretted not fitting in Divine Intervention and Chihwaseon, and it took substantial
discipline to wait for the commercial release on a few others (particularly Far From Heaven).

Monday, December 7, 2015

This is
the sixth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Dolls (Takeshi Kitano)

Kitano’s
stone-faced action films have always incorporated a deep vein of lyricism, if
not sentimentality (see especially Kikujiro),
although his last film Brother was
something of a regression to deadpan violence. Dolls takes Kitano to an astonishing new level – it’s unabashedly
romantic. The film loosely intertwines three stories. A man abandons his
fiancée and she ends up brain-damaged after a suicide attempt – he returns to
her and they end up wandering the country, permanently attached by a rope tied
around their waists. An aging gangster rediscovers the love he left behind long
ago. A pop star’s career is ended by accident: a devoted fan blinds himself and
then forges a relationship with her. Even that brief synopsis indicates the
film has a perverse streak, but that’s merely seasoning to a banquet of color
and design and balletic juxtaposition. The film has one memorable image and
idea after another, often tossed away with the confidence of a real master. The
theme is the fragility of human interaction, how the heart jerks us around like
puppets; not such a revelation in itself, but there’s never been a treatment of
it quite like this one. Possibly the best film I saw at the festival –
certainly the one I have the most immediate interest in seeing again.

(NB
December 2015 update – I never did see Dolls
again, and can’t imagine it would be as striking now as I thought it was then,
but it would be nice to be wrong about that)

Moonlight Mile (Brad Silberling)

Silberling’s
gala presentation has already opened commercially, to a lukewarm reception.
It’s hard to imagine anyone having strong feelings either way about this movie
– it attempts to touch bases with all available emotions, but ends up occupying
some neutral zone where they all cross each other out. The film follows the
parents of a young woman shot dead in a random shooting, and her fiancée who’s
living with them, and it’s apparently based on a real incident from
Silberling’s life. The movie is distinctive enough that you accept it as the
record of a personal response to a personal tragedy, but this is something you
note academically, not emotionally. It has a dream cast – Dustin Hoffman, Susan
Sarandon, Holly Hunter, all of whom seem to be doing their own thing, and Jake
Gyllenhaal as the fiancée; he’s a sweet enough but overly mannered centre. The
film is visually quite delicate – I registered any number of pleasing
compositions, but all in isolation, like photographs from an album.

Shadow Kill (Adoor Gopalakrishnan)

This is
the first film I’ve seen by Gopalakrishnan – actually I’d never heard of him
before, although the Festival slotted this one into its “Masters” category. The
picture doesn’t quite confirm him as a master; it has the feeling of a relative
diversion from someone capable of much more ambitious work. It follows an aging
executioner who must do his duty even though the burden of the task has almost
eaten away his soul, and he’s become a drunk. Halfway through the film, on the
eve of an execution, a soldier starts to tell the story of a young girl’s rape
and murder, and we’re taken in another direction. The film has a stark,
divorced, slightly dreamlike feel, with intensely rich colours, and it has an
undercurrent of acute pain; it feels torn from a volcanic imagination kept here
within unnatural constraints. The ending feels hurried, and I think more people
walked out on this movie than just about any other I attended during the week.
Still, Gopalakrishnan’s work is clearly worth seeking out further.

La derniere letter (Frederick Wiseman)

Certainly
the simplest film I saw at the festival in terms of its raw ingredients, and
running just one hour, this is legendary documentarian Wiseman’s first “dramatic”
film. It’s a monologue performed by actress Catherine Samie, taking the form of
a last letter to her son from a Russian-Jewish woman trapped in the ghetto and
expecting to die at the hands of the Germans. She performs on a blank stage,
with no props, only shadows – sometimes multiple shadows that eerily evoke her
experiences reflected through multitudes of others (at times, this evokes the
expressiveness of something like Dreyer’s silent films). Wiseman does an able
job of varying the film’s visual impact, although the array of angles and fades
sometimes seemed to me rather arbitrary (such as the moment when she’s
describing the massacre in the ghetto and her hands seem to be showing rabbit
shadows). For all its inherent power and evocative scope, the text itself seems
to me unexceptional, and Samie’s performance is a standard-issue theatrical
display. Still, no one could be completely unmoved by the film, or by her final
exhortation to her son.

8 Women (Francois Ozon)

Ozon is
widely regarded as the most promising of young French directors, although his
diverse body of work so far includes a disproportionate amount of overdone
trivia. 8 Women is that too, but here
it evokes a blissfully, indulged kid who shows off his surplus of toys, wearing
a huge grin: how irritated can you be at him? With a dream cast of French
actresses (including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Emmanuelle Beart),
it’s a murder mystery confined to a single country-house set: Deneuve’s husband
has been killed and everyone (daughter, mother in law, maid etc.) has at least
one motive. Revelations fly in all directions – it’s as if none of them had
talked for a day before this. The piling-up of taboos causes hardly a dent in
the glamour – actually it serves as a liberation to several of the characters.
It’s a complete contrivance of course, but Ozon’s delight is infectious. The
eight musical interludes, one for each actress, cap this off as the kind of
music they just don’t make anymore (and insofar as it contains same-sex kisses,
they never did).

Russian Ark (Alexandr Sokurov)

Sokurov’s
film consists of a single 96-minute shot. There are other long-take films –
Andy Warhol kept the camera going five times as long on the Empire State
building; Mike Figgis in Time Code
did it simultaneously with four separate cameras – but I doubt it’s ever been
attempted on a project of such complexity. The camera travels through 200 years
of cultural Russian history – through theatres, art galleries, grand balls, a
meal at the table of the last Tzar – tied together by a European diplomat who
wanders through it all. The choice of a European guide is significant, for the
film evidences some regret – however knowing – for the loss of a certain grand
sense of what it was to be Russian, of a certain cultural sensibility. The film
indeed resembles an “ark,” a store of fragments of imperiled memory. At the end
the camera travels out through a window to stare at the sea, and the narrator
says “We are destined to sail forever…to live forever,” but this may be as much
wish as prediction. Sokurov’s films can be heavy-going, and his technical feat
here makes demands on the viewer – you realize how easy it is to let yourself
be guided by traditional montage. If a conventional film is a journey, Russian Ark is a privilege.

Eleven
short films by eleven directors from eleven countries, taking vastly different
approaches toward the basic mandate of commemorating/commenting on September
11. Under the circumstances, it’s remarkable how subtly balanced it feels as a
whole (compare to the other anthology package at this year’s festival, Ten Years Older: the Cello, in which the
broad subject of “reflections on time” failed to inspire most of the
participants to anything worthwhile). Penn and Lelouch both provide intimate
stories of loss taking place in the shadows of the twin towers – Penn’s is
especially lyrical and surprising. Tanovic, Gitai, Loach and Chahine contrast
September 11 to other atrocities. Chahine’s piece, weaving in fantasy elements
and evoking past American atrocities, is a particular reason why the project’s
been accused of anti-Americanism; his segment is unfortunately the clumsiest of
the bunch. Loach much more cogently contrasts 9-11-01 with 9-11-73, on which
the Chilean army (with American backing) rose against the elected Allende
government. Inarritu immerses himself in the event itself, generating a
shocking aural collage against a mostly black screen. Makhmalbaf and Ouedraogo
see the event through the eyes of children in Iran and Burkina Faso
respectively – Ouedraogo’s piece, about five boys who think they’ve spotted
Osama bin Laden, is especially engaging. Nair’s story of a woman whose missing
son was wrongly accused of being a terrorist is one of the less subtle
contributions. The movie ends with a typically weird story from Imamura, set in
Japan after Hiroshima and apparently relevant to September 11 only in the very
general sense that it points out the horror of war. All in all, the film places
9-11 in context without diminishing it; only the most supremely self-righteous
could seriously object.

The Eye (the Pang Brothers)

Screening
as part of the festival’s Midnight Madness section, this horror chiller almost
blows all its energy on a great opening tease in which the film seems to be
burning in the projector (“Bummer,” said the woman behind me). A young blind
woman receives a cornea transplant, but she now sees not just people from this
world, but also from the next. The opening aside, the film is best when
establishing the initial creepy mood (Kiyoshi Kurosawa may have been an
influence for some of this, but The Eye
is a more calculated, straightforward entertainment than his allusive genre
work). The more it gets into plot mechanics, the more it loses its initial
grip, although it regroups for a good finale. Other strong elements include a
sympathetic heroine, a pounding music score, and general technical finesse. I
never see more than one or two of the Midnight Madness selections every year,
and this is par for the course – better than average genre fare, but not really
deserving of the sobriquet “madness,” and not likely to keep a weary
festival-goer awake past midnight. Fortunately for me, I saw it at 11 am.

Ken Park (Larry Clark & Ed Lachman)

Larry
Clark seems to regard himself as the prophet of some dismal truth about teenage
suburban America – they have sex, they take drugs, they’re alienated and
screwed-up to the point that they could kill you as easily as look at you. And
by the way, the parents are no better. Ken
Park (the title refers to a character who shoots himself in the head at the
start) doesn’t even have as much plot as Kids
or Bully – it’s perhaps the ultimate
undiluted Clark experience. Ironic then that he has a co-director here for the
first time, but maybe noted cinematographer Lachman mainly contributed to the
film looking more proficient than Clark’s previous work. A plot summary would
sound like no more than a list of sleazy fantasies. The most interesting aspect
of this is in how the adults are deeply unnerved/threatened by/envious of the
kids’ sexuality and set out to appropriate it for themselves, thus
precipitating the very consequences that they claim to fear. If they left the
kids alone, everything would work itself out. The film then does have some
thematic merit, and some real sadness. But Clack ups the ante of explicitness
with every movie he makes, and it’s awfully hard to get past that surface.

L’homme du train (Patrice Leconte)

A
charming anecdote about an aging bank robber who comes to a small town to pull
off a job and crosses paths with a retired poetry teacher living a faded
bourgeois life (“except for needlework,” he says, “I have all the skills of an
early 20th century woman.”) They develop a mutual envy and each
starts to move in the other’s direction: the gangster starts wearing slippers,
reading poetry and smoking a pipe; the other fantasizes about being a tough
guy, and gets a new haircut (“somewhere between ‘just out of jail’ and ‘world
class soccer player’”). The amazingly facile Leconte keeps generating these
beautifully constructed, nicely shaded curios at the rate of one a year (they
include Ridicule and The Widow of St. Pierre). Like Louis
Malle, he thinks his way picture by picture, and will never make it into the
pantheon of auteurs, but he’s the best there is nowadays at the archetypal
well-made foreign film. This one has an effective steely gray texture, lots of
good one-liners, and ideal performances from Jean Rochefort and Johnny
Hallyday. On the debit side, it’s overly schematic, and sentimental too in the
end.

My Mother’s Smile (Marco Bellocchio)

Veteran
director Bellocchio disappoints with this turgid melodrama of an artist whose
dead mother (murdered by his brother) is under consideration by the Vatican for
canonization. A non-believer, he’s appalled at the prospect – far from
venerating his mother, he remembers her as a “stupid woman” with an
“indifferent, lethal” smile (rather than beatific, as others claim). However,
his relatives – regarding the prospect of a saint in the family as a good
business proposition and useful spiritual “insurance” – connive and lie to get
it done. Meanwhile, he’s separated from his wife, helping bring up his young
son, and maybe falling in love with the boy’s religion teacher. The film stars
Sergio Castellitto, magnetic star of Va
Savoir and Mostly Martha, lacking
his usual twinkle here.The film gets in
some good potshots at the saint-making industry, such as the mass production of
stupid photographs purporting to depict the mother’s martyrdom, and it’s darkly
handsome, but Bellocchio applies a heavy hand from start to finish, and the
story never ignites.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

This is
the fourth of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Kedma (Amos Gitai)

Gitai’s
latest exploration of Israeli history is much more successful than last year’s Eden, although that’s largely a result
of visceral pleasures: his one-take approach to battle scenes, for example, is
almost unmatched (and I include polished films like Saving Private Ryan). Actually starting with a virtuoso single
take, aboard a ship bringing a group of refugees to Israel, the film follows
some of the group as they evade British soldiers and then travel toward a
kibbutz, encountering Arab resistance on the way. The film is extremely similar
in tone and style to Gitai’s earlier work Kippur:
well-staged action alternates with debate and soul-searching, and the dialogue
can seem very forced at times. In general though, Kedma effectively sets out the contradictions at the heart of
modern Israel, never more so than in an anguished closing monologue (“I think
that Israel isn’t a Jewish country anymore”) on how Jews are pushed to violence
(Jewish history is “a history imposed by goyim”). And the film inevitably gains
power from its foreshadowing of current conflicts. “We’ll remain here in spite
of you,” shouts an old Arab at the Jews who stole his donkey in the course of
their journey, “like a wall…we’ll be hungry, we’ll be in rags. But we’ll defy
you.”

In America (Jim Sheridan)

An Irish
couple and their two daughters settle illegally in New York (fortunate enough
to find a large vacant apartment on their first day). They live on a
shoestring, always haunted by the recent accidental death of their young son.
For all of their troubles, New York remains a largely mystical atmosphere,
especially with the mysteriously charismatic black painter living downstairs,
and there are suggestions of celestial forces weaving through their lives
(aren’t there always?) The print shown at the festival qualifies “In America”
as a working title – maybe the final title should be “In Dreams,” because this
sentimental romanticizing of poverty doesn’t seem to have much to do with real
life as I’ve ever seen it. Ambling along as these anecdotal kinds of films
always do, it has the occasional good scene, but the grander ambitions fall
flat. Key among these is a concept of the father as closed-off and distant, so
unable to engage with life that at one point his daughter accuses him of being
an impostor; but it doesn’t come across, maybe because actor Paddy Considine
seems even more stilted than the character he’s playing. It adds up to a vastly
derivative project, teetering under the layers of uplifting mysticism that
Sheridan has it carry.

Secretary (Steven Shainberg)

Shainberg’s
debut film, about the sado-masochistic relationship between a bottled-up lawyer
and the disturbed young woman who comes to work for him, could be seen merely
as a catalogue of kinky ideas, and perhaps can’t be seen as much more than
that. So the value judgment all depends how you respond to the movie’s
extremely accommodating attitude. Personally, I liked it nearly all the way
along, with doubts really only arising over the ending, which casts the final
state of the relationship in rather conventional terms. In particular, the
final shot, in which she stares straight into the camera, daring us to judge
her, is too strenuous a statement of feminist credentials. That’s nearly the
only unsatisfying shot of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, who seems to have figured
out every nuance of her character. James Spader initially seems to be playing
his part more conventionally and superficially, but this is but one of many
ways in which the film’s deftness might initially be underrated. Some of the
weirdest (which I guess equals the best) ideas are almost thrown away, which
must be a sign of confidence. The film has already opened commercially since
the festival, and it’s taken some knocks for its exploitation aspects; your
enjoyment of the movie should be pretty closely correlated with your tolerance
for the premise.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)

Miyazaki’s
feature-length animated film has also opened commercially since the festival
(where it played as Miyazaki’s Spirited
Away). It’s the biggest hit of all time in Japan, and in the recent Sight
and Sound poll it received three votes as one of the best ten films of all
time. I’m no anime connoisseur, and
this film’s veins of cuteness, occasional visual flatness, and general
weirdness could confirm one’s prejudices – if you ignored the genuinely unique,
seemingly otherworldly imagination on display here. It’s about a young girl who
wanders with her parents onto what they think is an abandoned theme park – the
parents find and eat some food that changes them into pigs, and she finds
herself working in a bathhouse for the spiritual world. Miyazaki has worked out
every detail of the environment: the film has eye-popping spirits, and
explanations of the water-pumping system; boys that turn into flying dragons,
and railway systems that aren’t what they used to be. This has its serious
undertones – the festival brochure cites “the strength and insight of
innocence…the disintegration of religious faith and other forms of
spirituality.” But I question whether the film’s mysticism and theme of belief
in oneself are inherently that profound. The magic is in Miyazaki’s almost
disturbingly uncategorizable creativity, and a visual style that perfectly
expresses both the simplicity and complexity of his sensibility. I enjoyed Spirited Away as much as an animated
film I’ve ever seen.

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s
latest film initially resembles a piece of baroque science fiction – a man gets
beaten up, is declared dead, comes back to life but without any memory of who
he is, and establishes a meagre living for himself, including a mild romance
with a Salvation Army worker. As he becomes more secure in his new identity,
the film becomes looser and more discursive – and, for me, distinctly less
interesting. Much of the second half consists of musical performances by a
Salvation Army band that he coaxes onto a more popular style – they’re nice
enough songs, but it’s indicative of a somewhat flabby movie. One of the
picture’s abiding pleasures is its cinematography – especially in the early stretches,
containing some of the most vivid colour compositions since The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Sadly, the
film seems to tone this down as it progresses, perhaps as another reflection of
his escalating normalization. And although the Festival brochure promised “one
of the great performances by a dog on screen,” the dog too fades away as the
movie goes on. The film starts off as one of Kaurismaki’s most muscular and striking
works and ends up seeming run-of-the-mill for him – it adds up to a highly
watchable but disappointing effort.

A film
consisting of eight short segments by eight famous directors. Like most
previous exercises along these lines, it’s a disappointment, evidencing little
inherent reason for existing. The segments all deal in some way with the
“phenomenon of time,” but this vague mandate isn’t enough to lend the project
much coherence. The best are probably Bertolucci’s – an elegant glide through
episodes in the life of an immigrant – and Godard’s: working in the kind of
collage-form he’s used on many other occasions, he expands the scope and
emotional resonance of his segment beyond what the others achieve. Radford
comes in a surprising third, using an old-hat science fiction premise but at
least investing his sequence with good design and mild panache. As for the
rest: Figgis uses the same four-screen/one-take technique he used in Time Code – nothing new ensues. Menzel
juxtaposes scenes from the life of a Czech actor, achieving only mild poignancy
(although I note that this sequence made the woman beside me cry). Szabo’s is a
well-handled but basically mediocre one-take melodrama about how quickly a life
falls apart. Denis’ segment is all talk. Schlondorff’s juxtaposes a banal
voice-over with a banal series of images – the only distinction being that the
sound and image are banal in quite different ways. For all its philosophizing,
the film’s main contribution to the study of time is to raise the question of
how such a film can seem to last so much longer than it actually does.

Julie Walking Home (Agnieszka Holland)

Holland’s
film is about the fragility of both the secular and the spiritual; about how
slight shifts in the equilibrium cause calamitous shocks. It’s not really that
distinctive a theme, especially when presented in what is by now her familiarly
overwrought style (see for example her last film The Third Miracle). Miranda Otto and William Fichtner are
common-law spouses whose happiness is torn apart by his one night stand – then
their son is diagnosed with cancer. She takes him to Poland in search of a
famous faith healer who falls in love with her. Much about the picture – the
mix of accents, locations, tone and ideas – has the feel of something pulled together
to satisfy a committee of competing interests, although the competition may all
dwell within Holland’s own sensibility. Her film has excellent moments (Otto is
especially striking, almost frightening, in her seductress mode) but it becomes
increasingly clear that the film has nowhere in particular to go. Like the
birds to which it returns as a motif, it merely circles, before choosing a
resting point that may be either arbitrary or deliberate (a distinction that
may matter to the bird, but not to the onlooker).

Lilja 4-Ever (Lukas Moodysson)

Swedish
prodigy Moodysson show here that he can work in a much darker register than his
first two films, Show me Love and Together. The film tracks a miserable
three months in the life of a 16-year-old Russian girl, who’s left alone when
her mother skips with her boyfriend to the States. With no source of income,
she slides easily into prostitution: the film is especially strong on depicting
the near-inevitability of this fate for women in dire circumstances. When she
finally meets an apparently nice guy who says he’ll find her a job in Sweden,
he turns out to be a procurer of child whores. It’s gloomy subject matter, with
almost every scene yielding some new tragedy or squalor. The young actress
Oksana Akinshina is disconcertingly unemotive through most of it. But the film
is ceaselessly perceptive and sensitive, without ever becoming sentimental, not
even when it depicts her visions of the over-dosed friend she left behind, now
sporting angels’ wings. The film was one of my favourites of the festival – not
as artistically imposing as Talk to her
or Dolls, but bringing a strong
individual voice to a work of diligent anthropology.

Marie Jo and Her Two Loves (Robert Guediguian)

Every
year, the festival selects one director for its retrospective spotlight
feature. Guediguian, this year’s choice, sets all his films (the best known is Marius and Jeanette) in working-class
Marseilles, and generally works with the same actors – his work thrives on intimate
recognition. His latest is no exception. It’s the story of a woman simultaneously
in love with her husband and another, finding that the weight of her love
carries an inverse correlation to that of her happiness. “I only feel at peace
when I make love,” she says, “otherwise I suffer.” The movie portrays this
state adeptly, and is equally good at depicting the loneliness of being the man
she’s not currently with. Guediguian paces things deliberately (some would
certainly say slowly), spending much time on the details of their jobs and on
inconsequential moments. He achieves the authenticity for which he aims, but
can’t dispel a sense of familiarity (whether measured against his own previous
work or that of others who’ve explored this territory). Towards the end, Marie
Jo’s daughter erupts at her parents in idealistic disgust, and you realize how
muted the film has generally seemed prior to that point. And while it seems
clear that the director might profit from expanding his range, the swirling
tragedy of this film’s final image isn’t a particularly effective step in that
direction.

La ville est tranquille (Robert Guediguian)

The
spotlight on Guediguian also included this film from 2000 – perhaps his most
ambitious and most successful. A social epic along the lines of John Sayles or
Robert Altman’s films, it weaves together some grim and often heart-rending
stories of people trying to get by. A woman who works at the fish market
prostitutes herself to buy drugs for her addicted daughter; a laid-off
dockworker tries to make it as a cab driver but sinks into financial troubles;
a black man is released from prison. Right-wing politics percolate in the
background. The director’s at full strength here; intently focused on his characters,
allowing us to feel the quiet desperation that mainly defines their lives (the
muted quality of Marie Jo is more
successful here because we understand it as a reflection of demands and pain
that defy words), tracking occasional eruptions of joy and hope, of pain and
despair. The film has a slight penchant for melodrama, which threatens to disrupt
the verisimilitude, and the hopeful final image seems a little idealistic, but
Guediguian doesn’t pretend there are easy answers for any of this, and his film
as a whole seems wise and balanced.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

This is
the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

All or Nothing (Mike Leigh)

Leigh’s
last film Topsy Turvy was an
unexpected departure for the master of low-income British angst, and a complete
success. The new film, back on familiar territory, inevitably looks like
treading water by comparison. It’s loosely structured around three miserable
families in a drab London housing complex – they drink or eat too much, or lose
themselves in sexual role-playing, or in random anger, or superficial good
spirits, or just in all-consuming inertia. Timothy Spall plays a cab driver,
trapped in his own misery, avoiding all responsibility. Sensing himself on the
verge of disappearing completely, he finally breaks out, resulting in a series
of scenes that, if a little over-emphatic, almost rank with Leigh’s best work.
That plot strand arrives at a generally happy ending, but Leigh lets the other
two stories drop completely; in cinema as in life, he seems to be saying,
positive outcomes are largely a matter of chance. Like every Leigh film, All or Nothing is crammed with fine
moments that shine a passing spotlight on a secondary character, anchoring the
film in the world beyond the frame. But it has a more muted tone than most of
his work, making less overt use of comedy, and most viewers will find it less
insinuating than something like Secrets
and Lies.

Too Young to Die (Park Jin-Pyo)

This
Korean film has a simple purpose – to celebrate the love of a man and a woman.
This is out of the ordinary only because the couple are in their 70s, and they
have a lot of sex. It shouldn’t be a surprise that older people can do it
multiple times a week, sometimes a day (the man helpfully marks each session
off on his calendar so we can follow along), but if it wasn’t a surprise the
film presumably wouldn’t exist. It’s somewhere between documentary and fiction
– seeming to have a script, but played by a real life couple who aren’t
professional actors. Objectively, it’s a pretty voyeuristic project (the film
shows the sex in some detail), but it doesn’t feel that way, mainly because the
couple (especially him) are so happy to show themselves off. For the sake of
balance, the picture shows a few rough patches, such as a spat about her
staying out too late with her friends. But if it was ever in doubt that the
movie takes a sentimental view of its subjects, then the incredibly sappy
closing song would wipe it away. Almost incidentally, you notice that their
living conditions are pretty meagre, and there’s the odd reminder of cultural
differences (when he wants to make her a chicken dinner, he buys a live bird
and slaughters it in the yard) but these observations come only intermittently,
amid the calculated universal appeal.

Auto Focus (Paul Schrader)

Schrader
(who made American Gigolo and one of
my all-time guilty pleasures, the remake of Cat
People) ought to be the ideal director to film the story of Bob Crane, the
genial stay of Hogan’s Heroes who
became obsessed with sex and pornography as his career declined. Auto Focus tells the story efficiently
and intriguingly, but it doesn’t particularly look like a Schrader film; it
doesn’t seem interested in plumbing the depths of Crane’s soul, and the echoes
of Bresson that used to mark Schrader’s work are just a memory here. In a way,
Schrader should be praised for his self-effacement. He certainly captures both
the bounce and optimism of Crane’s rise to fame in the 60’s, married to his
college sweetheart with no darker secrets than a few racy magazines hidden in
the garage, and the tackiness of his decline in the 70’s. But this isn’t a
chronicle of the age like Boogie Nights
– it’s a rather hermetic story of one sad figure, and in telling it so
straight, Schrader risks our indifference. Willem Dafoe is rather
one-dimensional as the hedonist who led Crane astray, and Greg Kinnear’s
performance in the lead role sums up the picture – wholly convincing as the nice
guy, but generally just too convivial and straightforward to be particularly
interesting. There are many good moments though – his meltdown on the set of Celebrity Cooks, hosted by Bruno
Gerussi, is especially well caught.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce)

Noyce
used to make provocative little Australian films, but in recent years he’s been
the anonymous general behind such epics as Clear
and Present Danger and Silver.
This film marks a home-coming: it’s about three half-Aboriginal girls in 1931,
sent 1,800 miles from their home to a special school for “half-castes.” The
film makes it clear that there were many such “shadow children,” and has a
chilling scene where Kenneth Branagh, as the leader of the cleansing program,
explains the official philosophy on the matter. The children escape and set off
to walk the vast distance home. Most of the film is devoted to their journey
and how they evade the state’s efforts to catch up with them – including a
veteran tracker played by David Gulpilil, who starred thirty years ago in
Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. The film is
gripping, and evokes suitable anger at what the children endured. But maybe
Noyce has become too efficient a storyteller – you feel very little of the
passage of time, or the incredible distance they covered, or of their hunger or
thirst. This is one of the rare films that’s actually too short – we feel
short-changed on the bigger picture of Australia at the time, the visceral
experience of the journey, and the story’s potentially mythic underpinnings.
The evocation of Walkabout reminds
you how that and other movies found real grandeur in the desert.

Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako)

Mauritanian
director Sissako’s film is suffused in ambivalence about Africa – he celebrates
its beauty and mystery, but constantly returns to images of departure and
escape (or more frequently, failed attempts at departure) and thoughts of a
different life. The film is loosely structured, and the exact meaning of what
we’re watching isn’t always clear – the most recognizable plot strand involves
a young boy serving as apprentice to an aging electrician, accompanying him
from job to job. Initially the film may seem opaque, but you adjust to its
rhythm. It’s crammed with gorgeous images, such as the electrician and the boy
hooking up a light bulb to an outlet and then carrying it into the desert for
what seems like miles. It’s a dream-like Africa, encompassing desert and city
and village and the water’s edge – parameters that hold the characters in place
even as their parched spirits tell them to move on. The old man remembers a
friend who offered him the chance to leave; finally the friend went without
him, never to be seen again. “Maybe that’s what weighs on my heart,” he says:
it’s the skill at depicting this weight through images that makes Waiting for Happiness such an eloquent
work.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

This is
the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan)

Egoyan’s
opening gala presentation certainly doesn’t seem like the work of a great
filmmaker; it evokes instead a disgruntled academic translating his theories
onto celluloid. Set in present-day Toronto, it examines the continuing
spiritual and emotional impact of Turkey’s massacre of Armenians in 1915.
Characters include a director (Charles Aznavour) who’s making a film on the
subject, an art history professor (Arsinee Khanjian) who’s a consultant on the
picture, and her troubled son. Ararat
doesn’t purport to present the objective truth of what happened in 1915, and
acknowledges that there are problems in the historical record; it dwells on the
difficulties of sustaining memory and remembrance. That aspect of Egoyan’s film
is fairly interesting, but it’s filtered through some very cumbersome emotional
set-ups and bizarre artistic decisions (for example, much of the film consists
of a labored dialogue between the son and an overbearing customs officer played
by Christopher Plummer). The messiness isn’t without consolations, but it makes
for a distinctly dutiful, visually undistinguished viewing experience. The use
of the film within the film, including a gala premiere at the Elgin, seems like
mere navel-gazing, but then Egoyan doesn’t exhibit much sense of the real world
– you’d think from Ararat that 1915
was the number one conversation topic in our city.

Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar)

Almodovar
has mastered the art of making outlandish narratives seem as natural and
graceful as a dance. His new film, in which dance is actually woven prominently
into the design, revolves around two men, both in love with (wait for it) women
in comas. One (who, in typical Almodovar fashion, thinks of himself as being
more gay than straight) sees this state as an enhancement rather than an
impediment; the other is understandably more ambivalent. Events build to a
shocking violation that Almodovar somehow manages to render smooth and
understandable. He has the old-fashioned virtue of liking his characters – his
benevolence is almost boundless, sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. But
this is as beguiling a movie as he’s made (even after the clear artistic
advances of Live Flesh and All About my Mother). It shifts gears
and perspectives with imperceptible ease, sliding forwards and backwards in
time in a way that makes most narratives of that type seem highly
self-conscious. It’s poised and consistently beautiful, even if the broader
insights (the title sets out the main message – the importance of
communication) don’t amount to much.

10 (Abbas Kiarostami)

It’s
always in question whether Western viewers appreciate the work of an Iranian
director like Kiarostami too much through our own prism (reflecting our own
morals, ethics, aesthetic tradition, sexual politics, received notions about
Iran). This may be especially tempting with his new film 10 (not a remake, obviously, of the Blake Edwards semi-classic),
which consists solely of ten one-take scenes of a divorced woman, driving in
her car with various passengers. In the first scene, her young son lambasts her
as a bad, stupid mother; shortly afterwards she picks up a whore who scoffs at
her moralistic questions. Later on in the film, the son again criticizes her
for various things, but by then she takes it much more in stride. In the later
scenes she counsels a distraught woman not to depend so much on just one
person, and advises another to loosen her veil (which in such a physically
controlled film generates considerable visual excitement). As the film
progresses, the increasing use of cross-cutting between characters seems to
reflect a growing sense of security and engagement on her part. The film thus
appears to be primarily an illustration of a woman’s growing sense of
self-determination as she adjusts to life on her own, but I suspect it may be
subtler than a single viewing can appreciate. Intriguing as 10 is, I think many Kiarostami fans may
miss the broader canvases of his earlier work.

Lost in La Mancha (Keith Fulton and Luis Pepe)

In 2000,
director Terry Gilliam finally rolled film on his long-cherished adaptation of Don Quixote. The project came with an
unrealistic budget, inadequate rehearsal and preparation time, looming chaos,
and memories of his 1989 over-budget fiasco The
Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (which earned him a reputation as an
undisciplined enfant terrible, not overcome by subsequent relatively saner
projects such as The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys). The first day saw a
freak storm that instantly threw the schedule into disarray. By the end of the
first week, lead actor Jean Rochefort was in the hands of his doctors with a
herniated disk. The film struggled on through a sixth day before collapsing
completely, sending millions of dollars and Gilliam’s dreams down the tubes.
Miraculously, Fulton and Pepe had cameras rolling on the whole thing, resulting
in one of the most vivid portrayals of filmmaking ever made. Gilliam starts off
somewhat enamoured of his own legend (“Without a battle, maybe I don’t know
exactly how to approach it”); when on the first day he asks how they’re doing
for time and the response is “Bad,” Gilliam reflexively snaps back “Good.” His
childish giggle when something goes well is infectious. But as disaster engulfs
the project he seems overwhelmed, almost paralyzed. His Don Quixote film, from what we see of it, would probably have ended
up much like Munchhausen – a treat
for Gilliam fans, mainly a curio for anyone else; the fact that we’ve been
denied that film, but given Lost in La
Mancha instead, probably isn’t a bad trade-off.

Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach)

At the
age of 66, Loach is working faster than ever, alternating missions into
unfamiliar territory (Spain in Land and
Freedom, Los Angeles in Bread and
Roses, one of his least successful efforts) with projects on home ground
(or at least Scotland, which is close enough). Sweet Sixteen doesn’t have much new about it, but it’s expertly
handled; no one captures the aspirations (or profanity) of the British
under-privileged as expertly as Loach. It follows a boy gravitating from
selling smuggled cigarettes to upward mobility in the local drug syndicate, all
before turning 16. He dreams of seeing his imprisoned mother free and clean,
but sees no irony in getting her there on the backs of junkies. Actually, irony
isn’t really one of Loach’s standard tools (compared say to skillful
tub-thumping) although the situation provides it in abundance (“I used to watch
my dad do this,” says a young pusher nostalgically, as he cuts the heroin).
Loach’s biggest weakness, for me, is his propensity for gangster figures and
their attendant melodrama. Still, this is a consistently gripping, moving work.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Last week
I wrote about the difficulties of getting one’s money’s worth out of a DVD
collection, given that the new movies keep on coming. Here’s more evidence: seven
mini-reviews (count em!)

Happy Times

Readers
may remember an article, a few years ago, in which I put together a fictional
list of directors that might have won the Nobel Prize for cinema, if such a
thing existed. My 1996 winner was China’s Zhang Yimou, a choice that now makes
my imaginary committee look severely impulsive. Since then, Zhang has made
various small-scale films that bear the limitations of trying to work within
the Chinese State system, and he’s seemed increasingly sentimental. His latest
marks a further regression, back to the emotional values and overall
sophistication of, well, the silent era. A bachelor in his 50s sets out to get
married, but instead ends up taking care of a blind girl who’s been mistreated
for most of her life. Having lied about his resources and status, he creates a
series of illusions to hide the truth from her. The movie’s main point of
distinction is its highly contingent happy ending. It’s not that the film’s bad
exactly – it’s just awfully minor and unambitious. I might not have minded it
at all, if I hadn’t kept kicking myself for letting my Nobel jurists lose their
heads over his earlier work.

Sunshine State

John
Sayles’ cross-section of small-town Florida life seems less accomplished than
earlier films of his like Limbo, Lone
Star or City of Hope, which
executed similarly ambitious exercises in Alaska, Texas and New Jersey
respectively. Having said that, Sayles seems on this evidence to consider
Florida a less accomplished place – a blandly low-input and low-return would-be
paradise where sterile design destroys all sense of history, place and
community. The film follows four or five main plot strands, although nothing
tops the brief glimpses of a local dignitary’s compulsive suicide attempts. The
film peters out more than it actually ends, but that seems like Sayles’ final
comment on the state – where he sealed off his Alaskan movie Limbo with a grand metaphysical
flourish, he lets his Florida movie fizzle and dissipate. Sunshine State also contains a hearty dollop of what seems pretty
much like standard melodrama; it’s always been Sayles’ oddity that he insists
on his integrity as an independent filmmaker, who then makes movies the greater
part of which could fit quite comfortably into the mainstream.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding

A bit fat
box-office hit, which does as much as any bland action blockbuster to show how
undemanding audiences can be. I didn’t register a single original joke or
observation in this compendium of clichés and platitudes about the travails of
an ethnic family (you’ve seen the same thing done with Jewish weddings, and
Italian weddings, and gay weddings…) Familiar Toronto locations (subbing for
Chicago) and faces make it even less convincing for local audiences. Nothing in
the movie is quite right – lead actor John Corbett overdoes the laid-back
charm, and lead actress and writer Nia Vardalos overdoes her initial frumpiness
and thereafter underdoes whatever quality is supposed to have snared Corbett.
And after plodding through the build-up to the wedding, the event itself is
over almost before it’s begun. Maybe if I were Greek it would have seemed like
a masterpiece of observation, although I have a Greek friend, and she sure
doesn’t act that way.

The Believer

At the
time of writing I haven’t actually seen the end of this film. With no more than
ten minutes to go, the Varsity projector broke down and they couldn’t get it
back up. Still, I saw enough to know that The
Believer is a near-must see. An astonishing creation about a Jew who embraces
Nazism, the film is the most articulate of the year, and one of the most subtly
perverse: the character’s escalating violence and radicalism coexist with a
longing to reimmerse himself in Judaism. Ryan Gosling gives a fine, fiery
performance in the title role. The film is sometimes too cluttered, and events
take place on such a melodramatic scale that they threaten to swamp the
character, but the worst never happens (not up to the last ten minutes anyway).

Signs

It’s a
hit, and some think that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan is the next
Spielberg, but I found this film dreary, shallow, and unremittingly
pretentious. Its central notion about faith and predestination is inherently no
more than earnest in a first-year philosophy student kind of way, but
Shyamalan’s genius is to set this against the backdrop of an alien invasion of
Earth, thus ensuring goofiness just one notch short of Edward D. Wood. And the
sillier the thing gets, the more seriously it seems to take itself. Mel
Gibson’s solemnity fits right in with the prevailing gravity. As for the
Spielberg comparison, I’m not among the greatest aficionados of Minority Report, but that film
outclasses this one by every worthwhile criterion. By the end of this preachy,
self-regarding farrago, I started to dislike Shyamalan personally.

Blood Work

Clint
Eastwood’s new film, on the other hand, is a model of self-effacement. This
thriller about a retired cop who investigates a woman’s murder (while carrying
her donated heart in his chest) has a pretty intricate plot, but lets it unwind
with so little emphasis and elaboration that you could almost miss it. This
lets some potentially interesting elements go floating away, but leaves behind
something most intriguing – a tersely written and shot procedural that
nevertheless feels like a character piece. The trouble is that the characters
are distinctly sleepy. As recent Eastwood movies go, Blood Work is more unified than Absolute
Power or True Crime, although the
zest of James Woods in the latter would have given the new film a welcome shot
in the arm.

Possession

Another
inherently odd project – a literary detective story contrasting a modern-day
love story between two academics (Aaron Eckhart and Gwyneth Paltrow), and the
object of their investigation: a 19th century romance between two
poets. The film is directed by the normally acerbic Neil LaBute, and often
seems like a change of pace for its own sake – it takes considerable pleasure
in the eccentricity of British high-cultural circles, which seems here as
deviously political as the white-collar slaying ground LaBute depicted in In the Company of Men. Perhaps
appropriately, most of the film consists of elements that are interesting
mainly in theory. It has its moments of grace, but never overcomes – and indeed
apparently welcomes – a pervasive diffident quality.

Monday, October 19, 2015

The
wonder of cinema is that it’s still a wonder to us. Virtually as long as the
medium’s existed, directors have tested the limits of its storytelling
conventions, but the conventions remain intact, and so the limits continue to
be tested. Of course, like everything else, it’s more knowing now. For all his huge intellect, Jean-Luc Godard’s 60’s and
70’s experiments and meditations seem to carry a rush of pure puckish joy
that’s missing from, say, Mike Figgis’ Time
Code. One could organize quite a debating session on the proposition of
whether or not cinema should be taken seriously. Maybe, to bend a movie title,
we should view it as hopeless but not serious.

Steven Soderbergh

Steven
Soderbergh, I mentioned the other week, works at a startling pace. In the last
five years he’s released Out of Sight,
The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic (for which he won an Oscar) and Ocean’s Eleven. That’s an impressive
line-up in such a short time, although it’s not easy to determine Soderbergh’s
creative personality from it. He makes vivid, lively films, full of incident,
attuned to their settings, and ably showcasing their actors. That may seem like
superficial praise, but maybe not, for Soderbergh’s interest in surfaces may be
worth just about any other director’s interest in depth.

Erin Brockovich is one of the most skillful star vehicles in
memory, and looks as though everything else in it was calibrated for the sole
purpose of showcasing Julia Roberts. Ocean’s
Eleven had no discernible purpose other than bringing together an eclectic
bunch of big name actors (the scene at the end, where the camera pans across
most of the cast standing contentedly in a row looking over Vegas, seems to me
to sum it up). The film clearly does not “work” as satisfying rounded
entertainment, but the project has a sense of itself that almost fuels you.

His new
film Full Frontal is intended as a
quick, low-budget diversion from this run of success (and it precedes his
big-budget science fiction film Solaris,
due out in November). It has another amazing cast. Roberts plays a magazine
writer carrying out an extended interview with up-and-coming actor Blair
Underwood. Or rather, that’s what happens in a film within the film; they
actually play actors. He’s having an affair with a frustrated executive
(Catherine Keener) whose marriage to magazine journalist David Hyde-Pierce is
breaking down. Keener’s sister is a massage therapist (Mary McCormack) who has
an unsatisfying encounter with a film producer (David Duchovny) while pursuing
a cyber-romance with a theater director (Enrico Colantoni) who’s directing a
bizarre production about young Hitler starring an egotistical actor (Nicky
Katt).

Attempts to connect

Soderbergh
says his movies aren’t about surfaces, but rather about our attempts to connect
(I have a feeling that lots of directors give something like this as a standard
answer). You can see this for sure in his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, but since then the theme is only evident
in glimpses. Full Frontal embraces it
more fully – almost every scene depicts some kind of failure to engage; whether
intellectual, emotional, spiritual or artistic. But this seems like an
inevitable result of a movie that thrives on chaos, that feels as though it set
its characters in almost random motion and then sat back to see what would
happen.

That
lackadaisical quality is central to Soderbergh’s intent here. He says: “You
look at that Godard period of ’59 to ’67, and you admire his ability to sketch.
And I think you can get too caught up in this idea that every movie you make
has to be a mural. And I really felt like I’d been doing that, and I felt like
I needed to afford myself the opportunity to sketch – where things aren’t, you
know, so weighted by expectation or budget. It’s not that I view the movie as
incidental. It’s just I liked the idea of having the freedom to write with the
camera, in a way. And in an environment that seems safe, because of the scale
of the project and the way it would be made. It’s a fun way to work; it’s an
interesting way to work. It’s sort of an irresponsible way to work if you’re
doing a movie on any other scale than this.”

Maureen
Dowd in The New York Times dismissed
the movie this way: “Just because something is grainy doesn’t mean it’s cooler.
Just because it’s shot in 18 days with a hand-held camera that cost $4,000
doesn’t mean it’s more creative. Just because it’s a neo-Godardian
deconstruction of cinematic reality doesn’t mean it’s more interesting. And
just because it has an erotic title doesn’t mean it’s sexy.” All of which is
self-evident (and to digress slightly, just because Dowd’s column has a hot
reputation and a Pulitzer Price doesn’t mean it’s always good either). But there’s little evidence that
Soderbergh believes any of these straw-man assertions. His faith seems more
elemental than that. He believes in the inherent fascination of cinema – that raw
ingredients need be subject only to the simplest of recipes to produce
something sustaining. Depending how you look at it, this may either be a low or
a high expectation of the audience.

Cinematic meaning

Most
critics find Full Frontal confusing
and arid. But the film is stuffed with intriguing scenes of conflicting
expectations, self-delusion, lifestyle corrections and compromises. Sometimes
it attempts to tap genuine emotion and frustration; sometimes it just plays at
it. In general, the moments when it’s explicitly about filmmaking seem to me
its least successful in that they only allow narrow readings. The rest of the
movie is wildly discursive and evasive – the absurdity of the Hitler play
rehearsals; some low comedy involving a dog overdosing on hash brownies;
one-liners galore.

On a
couple of occasions, Terence Stamp’s character from The Limey wanders through the movie – the intention being apparently
to suggest that the action in both films takes place side by side. Which
succeeds in suggesting the immense fluidity of cinema; how it takes only a
brief allusion or connection to open up a whole new world of cinematic meaning.
The problem is that this can easily become a process of mere recognition – you make
the connection, and where does that leave you? It’s as if we’re expected to be
excited by the fact that a guy can form sentences, regardless that they don’t
tell us anything interesting. We’ve all seen so many films that we think we’re
way beyond that. And yet those who know cinema best – Soderbergh, Godard,
Figgis – are often the most fascinated by the raw material. Personally, I don’t
think the rest of us know as much as we think. Could Full Frontal possibly be ahead of its time?

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).